PUBLISHED 06 September 2019
"Modern Foreign Languages are a fantastic enhancement to a child’s cognitive development, as well as adding greatly to their understanding of diversity and internationalism."
At AKS Preparatory School we know that Modern Foreign Languages are a fantastic enhancement to a child’s cognitive development, as well as adding greatly to their understanding of diversity and internationalism.
Modern Foreign Languages are timetabled every week for children from our nursery through to Year 6. The high-quality and engaging lessons are taught by a specialist teacher, following the Department of Education skills progression guidelines for each key stage. The objective is always to foster an enjoyment of language-learning and to develop skills and techniques that the children can use to learn any language going forward.
With this in mind, children in our nursery to Year 3 enjoy lively and engaging French lessons each week. In Years 4 to 6 the children will benefit from a three-term carousel of languages: one term each of French, German and Spanish, introducing two new languages and cultures, in preparation for their journey onward into our senior school.
The children will learn about celebrations and festivals in the target-language countries, which feature on the current GCSE syllabus, as well as using familiar, traditional tales (such as La Belle et La Bête and Hänsel und Gretel) to explore new vocabulary and phrases in the target language, while preparing for the future required skill of understanding literary texts at GCSE and beyond.
We believe that this approach will allow the children to build up a great background of cultural knowledge and develop strong, transferable language-learning strategies. The children can also use the carousel experience to gain an appreciation of which language they feel more affinity with, as they move towards more focussed language-learning in our senior school.